


The Pale Machines

by Tlon



Series: The Razes [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Class Differences, Dark Solarpunk, Developing Relationship, Electrocution, Erotic Economic Inequality, Gang Rape, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Knifeplay, M/M, Masturbation, Neo-Victoriana, Novella, Oral Sex, Original Slash, Police Brutality, Power Dynamics, Psychological Trauma, Schizo Tech, Science Fiction, Sexual Slavery, think upton sinclair crossed with the wind-up girl but also softcore porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-28 01:04:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 19,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6307921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everett Shao-Astor knows that he's grown up in a difficult world, and that nothing in that world can touch him. Like his family before him, his days are spent linking solar train networks across a post-disaster continent, directing golden machines built on an ugly foundation of human blood and pain. It's something he's rarely forced to think about, until he meets Jonathan.</p><p>Jonathan Lem has never known anything except the tenements and factories that produce things high society takes for granted. His one attempt at finding happiness got him sold into weeks of torture, and he swears he'll never get in anyone's debt again. But when Everett's intervention saves him from a brutal industrial accident, he has no choice but to trust him.</p><p>As the two grow closer, they get lost in the murky space between classes that were never supposed to touch... let alone do more. No matter how much Everett thinks he can do to protect Jonathan, it might not be enough to break out of the structures that shape both their lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Solar Mill

The solar mill is stifling in the first spring heat, and Everett has only been there half an hour. He doesn't like running these inspections, watching the long lines of men and women in shirtsleeves weaving panels for the Astor Line's photoactivated trains. And he doesn't like the foreman next to him, pointing at them like so many parts of the looms they work.

“You see that? That's your shrinkage problems right there,” the foreman says to Everett, pointing at the young dark-haired man in a painted yellow square labeled 52C. It takes Everett a moment to understand what he means: that the man's hand is caught in the loom, and it's slowly pulling him into its metal rollers. “People get dangerous when they're like that,” he continues, insinuating himself between Everett and the man, as if he might lunge at him. “Can't get out, can't pull back. Animal instinct takes over.”

The man doesn't lunge, and he doesn't beg for help as they walk by. He doesn't even scream, although the pain must be excruciating. He only gasps raggedly and shakes as the gears of the loom tick him closer to disaster, tugging at his twisted arm – he must have been reaching in to set one of the lines straight. Everett waits for the loom to stop, of its own volition or at the foreman's request.

“What's wrong?” he asks when it doesn't. “Won't it turn off?”

The foreman – his name is Cole, Everett remembers – shakes his head impatiently. “They're on a central circuit,” he says. “Can't shut one down without killing them all, and then once you boot back up you gotta check-”

“Are you just going to let him die?”

Cole shrugs. “He's not dying. Maybe lose the arm, gum up the machine a little – he's fired anyway, we've got no use for him. His own damn fault, probably let the filament snarl up when he was feeding and felt inside to fix it. Idiot. ”

Everett has been around metalweaving long enough to know that snarls are the fault of coilers, not of the men and women working the looms. But a single one will zig-zag through a panel like a scar, ruining it. Weavers, he also knows, are paid piecemeal.

“Shut it off,” says Everett.

“What?”

Everett doesn't wait, casting around the room until he sees a control panel in the corner. “Where's the emergency stop?”

“It'll disrupt the whole-”

“Shut it off.” Cole looks at him with sullen loathing, but Everett knows that his contract holds weight. Finally, he follows Everett to the control panel, flipping a plastic guard off one of its dozen identical buttons. Everett hits it, and the room plunges into silence, soon underlaid by the low, humming mutter of workers who find themselves suspiciously idle.

Everett runs back to the man. He puts a hand on his wrist and lifts the slack loom slowly, straining to see the hand's damage before its owner can. The fingers are bruised purple, fingernails split and weeping blood.

He knows better than to ask if the factory has medical support – he's read the quarterly earning reports as closely as anyone. “Go call a nurse,” he spits at the foreman.

“No.” Everett looks down as the injured man speaks for the first time. His eyes are pinched shut, voice a whisper. “The cost.”

“Then we'll cover it.”

“No!” Everett flinches at the edge in his voice. “Not running up more credit _here_.”

Everett looks again at the fingers. The foreman will call some other worker in to wrap or even tourniquet them if he's left here; he'll be in agony for weeks before they heal back in whatever haphazard order someone arranges them. And that's assuming they don't get infected, and the arm itself isn't wrenched too hard. “Not here,” he says. “I'll pay.”

The man shakes his head again, pulling his hand out of Everett's grasp. When he sees the loom's marks his voice dies in his throat and he slumps, falling heavily on his side with a soft, grating cry.

“Forget the nurse, call a hospital,” he tells the foreman again. “Put it on my invoice. What's his name, by the way?”

“How should I know?” Cole huffs. Everett glares at him, and he draws back, checking his clipboard. “Lem,” he says hastily. “Jonathan Lem.”

*

Jonathan wakes up to silence and the smell of crisp sheets. Both are as unfamiliar as the blindingly white walls and the slow, floating laziness of his thoughts. Or the wrappings, equally sterile, around one hand.

His last memories come back with a slicing ugliness that brings him back to focus. The slip, the white-hot press of metal, the panicked plans that had spun through his head one after another. The mess of his fingers when the man in the shifting polycarbonate coat had pulled them out. The man... the man he owes.

This isn't a corner clinic, it's a real hospital – maybe one of the shining buildings downtown, the ones he couldn't afford to even get in sight of. How many weeks' salary is the bed underneath him, the cast on his hand? And what, he wonders, is the man going to expect from him in return?


	2. Accounts Paid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jonathan Lem has the self-conscious cruelty of the petit bourgeoisie against the proletariat inscribed upon his flesh.

The last debt he owed was for Morgan's ring, the one she'd taken with her when she left. He can't remember what it looked like anymore, but he remembers every moment of paying for it.

When he buys the ring on credit, it costs enough that the price feels too abstract to worry about. And for months, it is, until two of the mill's on-call strikebreakers stop at his loom in the middle of the day and pull him back into the foreman's office. It's not the foreman he sees there, but a tall, silver-haired man in a suit too gaudy for the factory but too cheap for society. He must be with the trust, Jonathan thinks, the one that runs the mill and a dozen other businesses across Industry City. It's the trust, ultimately, that owns his debt.

The man smiles and slides an invoice over the table: loan, interest, wages. The first two numbers loom over the latter. “You can't cover this,” the man says. “It's mathematically impossible.”

Morgan's departure is still raw, and it's left Jonathan too numb to respond to much. But the man's pinched, sallow face chills him into action.

“I'll pay,” he says. “I'll borrow money-”

“I've seen your records,” the man says, taking the sheet back. “The only people who would lend you money have even less than you do.”

Jonathan nods slowly, lightheaded. “I don't have the ring anymore,” he says. “I don't...”

“Then you've got to make it up, don't you? There's a certain amount of overtime work we could arrange. Faster money.”

He knows all the words of the sentence, but he can't string them together to uncover their meaning. Instead, he nods again, wary.

“Good. It's much easier if you're willing,” the man says, apparently taking his stalling for assent. He smiles. “Are you a virgin?”

Jonathan looks up, wondering if he's heard right. The man repeats it, and Jonathan can't imagine he's so far gone that he's hallucinating.

“N-no,” he says finally. “I'm – I was engaged.”

“Oh, well. Come here.”

He hesitates, and the strikebreakers take hold of his arms, expressions halfway between smirk and apprehension. They force him closer.

“Hold him down, please.”

They bring him around and push him to the desk, head cracking on its laminate. One keeps a palm between his shoulder blades, reducing his breath to gasps.

The silver-haired man runs a hand under Jonathan's shirt and works it off button by button, stopping when Jonathan strains his arms against having it pulled off.

“If you're smart, you'll leave yourself some clothes for when you get out of here,” the man whispers into his ear. “Unless I should send you back naked.”

So he relents and lets the man slide his shirt off and remove his pants without protest. He doesn't know if he could move now, even if he weren't restrained. The man grabs Jonathan's hips and rubs himself against him, unzipping his own fly. Jonathan closes his eyes. What comes next is just as painful and humiliating as he expects, made worse by being watched as it happens. He grits his teeth and wonders if he could have been spared this if he'd lied, if he'd made the man save him for someone else. It's too late now, as he's driven hard against the desk.

The best he can do is stop himself from crying. He didn't cry when Morgan left, even when his lungs felt like they'd been ripped out and cut apart with grief. He didn't cry when his father had fallen on the slick in a meat vat-house and never gotten up. He didn't cry when he started work for the first time years and years ago, when his parents woke him hours before sunrise and told him to go out if he wanted to eat.

But at least all those things had some dignity about them. They didn't end with him being shoved to the ground roughly in a tangle of his own clothes, left at the man's knees. Or with the man lifting Jonathan's head and sliding the invoice under it before he leaves, a new number inked under _accounts paid_. With the man letting him know exactly how much his body is worth. It's higher than he'd make in a full day at the loom. But he knows that to anyone in society, he's been sold for pennies.

He works by dumb instinct at the loom after, wondering if everyone else knows somehow. The next day, the strikebreakers meet him early in the morning, and he goes willingly, hoping none of the neighboring workers notice.

The hotel they take him to is only a few blocks from the mill, whitewashed and signless. Inside it's worse, a thousand times worse, than the foreman's office. In one of its rooms, he's left naked on a hard mattress with his arms pulled above his head and manacled to the wall, nothing to look at but the thick stucco of the ceiling. The door opens, and the first man comes in, not bothering to speak as he knocks his legs apart.

It's better when they don't speak, he realizes soon. When they do, it's to call him a whore and a parasite, to whisper what they'd like to do to him. Sometimes they do it – only a slap if he's lucky, knees in his ribs and bites on his neck if he's not. Hours in he does begin to cry, silently, and the man on top of him cracks him across the face with a ring-studded hand and tells him to be grateful for the money.

He is grateful, though. At the end of the day they calculate his debt and while it's only a fragment of what he owes, it's a relief to see it shrink.

*

They take him every few days, occasionally treating the worst of the injuries he takes. They don't waste anything else on him – no painkillers, even when he can't stop crying out and his clients either find it erotic or hit him until he's dazed. After a while he recognizes the same faces, some firm and full enough to be society, and he wonders how much more bruised and haggard he looks to them after every session.

One day they take him not to the room, but to a heavy black carriage, handcuffing and blindfolding him for the trip. It doesn't matter, because he wouldn't recognize anything outside the tenements around the factory. Wherever they stop, the air is no longer slum-stale, and there is no hum of light rail pallets, carrying their weave to the prestigious assembly plants where it will be somehow molded into the shapes – trains, balloons, floating society estates – that Jonathan sees in snapshots on the factory walls.

He feels and hears this only for a few minutes, though, before he is pushed down stairs and only sickly light seeps around the corners of his blindfold. Someone else might have choked at the heavy stillness of the air, but the years have trained Jonathan to feel at home in it. Its silence betrays a presence in front of him, breathing steadily and easily. Cautiously, Jonathan lifts the blindfold and looks up.

The man is fair and thick-set, his heavy jaw chiseled by a precisely cut beard. He is society, or at least rubs up against it often enough, even if his clothes are dark and nondescript. He looks down and smiles. “Finally,” he says. “They send a good-looking one.”

Jonathan watches carefully. He risks a glance around the room and sees only pegs on the walls, a black box sitting coffinlike beside the man, and a perforated metal circle in the center of the room. A drain.

The man hooks Jonathan's cuffs with his dandy's metal cane and pulls him up. He grabs his neck and stares straight at him, their eyes meeting for a second before Jonathan does what he's been trained for all his life and drops his gaze, looking at the floor. The man laughs.

“Good boy, aren't you?” he says. “Then I'm sure you know your place.”

Jonathan hesitates. The man pulls his cane free and swings it into the back of his legs, knocking him to his knees again. Without waiting for any further response, he unzips his black linen trousers and strokes himself for a moment before forcing Jonathan's mouth open with his cock.

For all the men – and the few women – who have taken their pleasure on him, it's the first time he's ever been made to do this. He gags at the unfamiliar taste and pressure of the man's flesh, and the man responds by gripping his hair painfully and holding him tight as he hits the back of his throat again and again. Jonathan's jaw aches, and he can't breathe without provoking the man into pushing even deeper. It's been barely five minutes and already he's fighting tears.

The man comes with a grunt and collects himself quickly, straightening his clothes. Jonathan waits, motionless, not even daring to untwist the handcuffs that have begun cutting into his wrists. Then the man hooks them again and drags him to the wall, fixing them on a peg that leaves him straining to reach the ground. For a moment he's gone, back turned as he sorts through the coffin-box. When he returns, it's bearing a vicious, die-cut steel blade, its edges rule-straight.

Jonathan's heart races, and he thinks about the drain on the floor. Would they sell him to be killed? He has no doubt that they could – there may not even be anyone to miss him. He'll die chained to a wall after weeks of torture and humiliation, over a woman who might never have even loved him.

There are glowing water insets in the hilt, Jonathan notices as the man brings the knife to his throat. At first he thinks it's a strange decoration, but then he feels the blade's chemical heat and understands that it's to protect the man as he metes out pain. The man lightly rests the edge against Jonathan's neck, and the skin sears.

“Please don't kill me,” Jonathan whispers, staying as still as possible. He hadn't meant to say it, but there's no point in staying strong. “Please, god please don't kill me.”

The man pushes the knife a little deeper, cauterizing the wound before it can draw blood. He leans close, as if he wants to hear Jonathan's halting, frightened breathing. And then he removes it and draws it across his shirt, cutting the cloth away and leaving him half-naked against the damp wall.

The man makes the cuts slowly and deeply, pausing with the knife still in Jonathan's flesh while he listens to his screams. Soon his chest must be a mosaic drawn in furious red – he doesn't look, keeps his eyes closed as tears trickle down his face.

He feels the heat leave his chest and settle above his forehead. “I could cut your eyes open,” the man muses. “Make you watch. Would you like that?”

Jonathan shakes his head as much as he's able without risking the knife. “No, please no,” he says. “Please just stop – just stop hurting me. I'll do anything you want.”

“You'll _do_? That's why you're here: proles like you can't do anything. You're only worth the air you're breathing under somebody who can use you.” His tone nearly stings worse than the knife. “But you're in luck, because I do think it's time to put you to use again...”

He taps the cuffs, and they spring open at his thumbprint, dropping Jonathan to the floor. Jonathan tries to lay back, to avoid aggravating his burns, but the man pushes him onto his stomach and strips him, holding him down as he struggles against the pain. His face scratches against the rough cement floor as the man thrusts. He can barely breathe, and what little breath he has is taken up with thick, shaking sobs.

The factory isn't entirely innocent – he's been propositioned by foremen, occasionally groped on breaks. He's clocked out of a Christmas shift when one of his bosses stumbled in rosy with whiskey, when he ordered Jonathan into a thread room and pushed him against a wall mumbling drunken double entendres, leaving only when he turned out to be too many drinks deep to fuck. But no matter how cavalierly they treated him, how little he was paid, it was better than being told he's no good for anything but being torn apart and degraded. Better than being lifted up afterward and propped against the wall like a marionette, having his wrists clipped into the cuffs again.

“I'm going to go have a little break,” the man whispers, tongue tracing the inside of Jonathan's ear. “Don't worry, I'll be back, and we'll have a lot more fun.”

He starts to cry again once the man is gone, as the adrenalin fades and the pain of the burns slowly seeps into every corner of his mind, clinging to his thoughts like tar. He tries not to think about what's going to happen to him when the man returns, or about how much longer he has to live. Or, if he's somehow meant to come back from this, what kind of shape he'll be in when he returns.

The man has a new toy when he comes back, a galvanic prod that he uses on Jonathan's exhausted arms and burned chest and trembling legs, until he's lost his voice from screaming and begging. When the man lets him down and rapes him again, every moment feels like a year in hell, his body close to shutting down from the abuse.

“No...” he chokes out as the man prepares to hang him up again. “No, I can't – I can't take any more god no...” he loses the rest of the sentence to quiet sobs.

The man doesn't ignore him, as he assumed he would. “Tell me you're worthless,” he growls instead, holding Jonathan against the wall.

Jonathan repeats him, voice shaking, and the man hits him and makes him do it again until he decides it's been said earnestly enough.

“Thank me for making you useful – and look at me!”

He swallows the humiliation of looking into the man's eyes and pretending gratitude for his ordeal. He's so far gone that he can barely even tell if the man is wrong – if he's ever been good for anything but this. Even Morgan, at the end, must not have thought so. The man wipes his tears away with one thumb and slides a finger into his mouth, exploring his teeth with its pad. And then he withdraws and lets Jonathan thankfully slide to the floor, lying on his side and staring into nowhere.

“You've got a lot to be thankful for. Think it over,” says the man, voice dripping smarmy condescension. “I'll be back.”

Jonathan drifts into a catatonic half-sleep, kept from rest by the immediacy of his wounds. He shakes uncontrollably, from the prod's aftershocks and the fear of what comes next. He can't have much more to give, not after his screams, his pleas, his self-denunciations. Of course, he's wrong.

The man has changed his clothes and carries a tumbler of water. An aching thirst surfaces through all Jonathan's pain, and he tries and fails not to stare at the glass.

“Do you want this?” the man asks, smiling when he nods. “I thought so. And all I want in return is a little bit of a show. Touch yourself.”

“I --” Jonathan shakes his head slightly. “Please, I don't...”

The man sends the glass smashing to the floor and strides across it, stomping on one of Jonathan's fingers as he grabs him by the hair. Jonathan looks desperately toward the water running to the drain, just out of his reach, as he's hoisted to his knees. “Now.”

Tears coming to his eyes again, Jonathan rubs himself with his good hand. The man explores his mouth with a finger again, then slides into it slowly, groaning with arousal. He belittles and insults him and all Jonathan can do is try to shut it out, succeeding only for moments at a time. Until the derision begins to bleed into his thoughts as he edges toward orgasm – he's being made to get off to being called a mindless whore, to the man's elaborate fantasies of carving him apart piece by piece, to being choked with his cock.

He can't even remember what happens when it's over, only that he wakes up in the carriage again wearing his pants and nothing more. There's antiseptic ointment on his chest, but they haven't treated him with anything else. When he asks for water, they gag him with what he recognizes as a piece of his shredded shirt.

*

Even this doesn't cancel his debt, although it accelerates its payment – a mixed blessing. He's no longer able to fake being all right when they chain him to the bed, and his burns attract high-paying men and women looking for pain. It's as if he's shifted into a twilight world where the only sex is violence, each day bringing cracked ribs and torn muscles and more bruises. He can no longer make the walk back to the factory, or even his tenement, only crawl exhausted into a side room and eat the simple meals that sometimes appear, whether out of pity or the knowledge that the trust's investment is in danger. In the mornings he begs the strikebreakers not to take him. It is the first time he has ever seen them seem uncomfortable with brutality.

Until one day, they don't come. He lays curled on the floor until the sun shines into the grimy windows, rising of his own volition for the first time in what feels like months. He barely catches the silver-haired man in the corner.

“You're paid up,” the man says. “Interest and principal. You can go back to the looms tomorrow.”

It hurts too much to stand, or even to raise his head enough to look the man in the eye.

“Your job's still there, if you want it. But I wonder if you realize how much you've made here. You could make a lot more if you keep up with it – a few regulars will be more than a little let down if you leave.”

It takes a moment for the full horror of what is being suggested to creep up on him. When it does, he shakes his head frantically. “No,” he says, with exhausted finality. “No. No more.” And then, ignoring the silver-haired man, he falls back to the floor and is asleep within minutes.


	3. Astor Transcontinental

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Everett Shao-Astor shares his love of freshly built trains and realizes that privilege means getting to see many things from far away, but few too close for comfort.

The memory of his debt is nearly enough to send Jonathan scrambling out of the bed, as if refusing to use it will somehow negate its cost. He'll kill himself before he spends another day chained down.

The door opens, and he looks at it with wild eyes. It's the man who is no longer in a polycarbonate coat, but a sleek silk jacket, its green setting off his sharp black hair. Even without the clothes, there would be no question of his social status; he stands too straight, body well-nourished and gently tanned. Jonathan knows what he must look like – pale, wiry, and exhausted from sixteen hours a day at the loom. And then there's the matter of the bandaged grotesquerie that is his hand.

“How are you feeling?” the man asks. Jonathan bites back a bitter _how do you think_ , because he manages, remarkably, to sound neither naïve nor condescending.

“I don't feel anything,” he replies, honestly. “I – how bad is it?”

“They saved the fingers, as long as you keep them clean until they heal,” the man says. “The fingernails will slough and regrow. The top joints will be a little stiff – although it seems like you had some injuries there already.” Jonathan nods, letting him think that the breaks came from industrial accidents and not depravity. “But I'm not a doctor. I can get one for you – ”

“I need to get out,” Jonathan says. “I shouldn't be here, and I can't stay longer.”

The man looks at him closely. “Because of the money?”

“Yes. And I – I don't like being closed in like this. In here.” He doesn't care, in truth – it may even be the most comfortable place he's ever stayed. But the rich, he thinks, have trouble understanding the visceral pain of accruing bills that one cannot pay. Claustrophobia is a more universal, comprehensible fear.

“Where will you go?”

“I...” Jonathan remembers the foreman's dismissive comments and knows that there is no place for him if he goes back now. He has little at his cockroach-ridden tenement, probably enough for someone to sell to cover his overdue rent.

“If you don't take care of this, it'll go septic,” says the man, pointing at his bandages. “You'll lose it – the fingertips at best, your whole arm at worst. If you don't want to stay in hospital, I'll put you up for a week or two. It's my contract that got you here anyway,” he says, threading his fingers together like cable-rope. “You probably made a sizable portion of my latest train.”

“What's your name?” Jonathan asks. It's impertinent, but he's trying to decide whether he'll be able to stand having this man on top of him, being asked to get on his knees in front of him. Whether he'll only want service, or if fixing Jonathan's hand is the start of some darker desire to witness his pain.

“Oh – Everett Shao-Astor,” the man says crisply. “I should have told you that sooner. Pleasure to meet you, Jonathan Lem.”

His years have trained him to expect the worst of people. They've trained him to remember that society doesn't think of him as a person at all. But of all his options, Jonathan thinks, Everett Shao-Astor is all he's got left.

*

Everett calls a solar hansom for them both. Jonathan hesitates, and Everett wonders if he's going to bolt after all – if he wants to leave that badly, it's not Everett's place to stop him. Finally, he boards, taking a seat and remaining perfectly motionless as they glide off, as though the stillness might render him invisible.

“I've got to make a stop by the trainyards,” Everett says. “Have you ever seen one?”

“Pictures.”

“It's not the same.” With the painkillers, Jonathan should be well enough to have a quick look around, Everett guesses. He wishes he'd thought to bring clothes for him. The hospital washed the set he'd come in wearing, but one sleeve is frayed, its edges torn and chewed by the loom. And the rest is cheap denim and rayon, fitting loosely on his form. Jonathan Lem has the lean, efficient muscles of those who work long and eat little, a physique that drifts in and out of style with society men.

Now, Jonathan is staring at the bandages on his hand, laid flat across his legs. From the doctors' descriptions, it was in dubious shape even before the injury, the muscles of his fingers stiffened with scar tissue. This accident will hardly make things better, but they've at least managed to stretch them out, work them a little straighter than they'd be otherwise inclined.

Everett wonders how long he's worked at the looms. Intellectually, he understands that accidents will happen sometimes, no matter what. He isn't romantic enough to think that everyone in the city can live like society does, nor that he would make anyone else's life better by giving up his contracts for solar weave or trying – as agitators do – to put all the workers out on the street by shutting their factories down. But he's never been confronted with the immediacy of the risks they take, or the carelessness given to their lives. On any day but the one Everett had chosen to visit, the loom would have taken Jonathan Lem's hand and the foreman would have thrown him out for letting it, for getting his flesh and blood over the panels that coat Everett's golden trains.

“Come on,” Everett says now, swinging out of the hansom onto the smooth steel of the trainyard streets. Jonathan follows slowly, keeping his eyes down.

The trainyard never ceases to dazzle him, not after years of visits. It's built on the ruins of its predecessor, now half-sunk into the sea – a floating pavilion buoyed paradoxically by cement boxes, the air they trap older than any one of his post-maglevs. Sometimes Everett wonders what else ends up down there, what detritus the boxes cull from the encroaching tides.

The Astor Line is at the far end, and Everett keeps close watch on Jonathan; it's easy to get lost among the machines here. When he looks over, Jonathan is favoring his injured hand, and Everett hopes it wasn't a mistake to take him here. He'd thought that he might enjoy seeing the results of his work, but maybe all it will do is remind him of the factory.

Finally, they stop before the subtle antique holographics of the sign that's stood there for three generations: _ASTOR TRANSCONTINENTAL FREIGHT AND PASSENGER LIMITED._ Most of the fleet is out on the rails, but they come for maintenance here – and for the ones arriving freshly from assembly, first tests. Everett always looks at those with a certain wistfulness, marveling at their sharp lines and flawless weave but knowing that the perfect sheen will be gone by the time their first run is over, no matter how much they're polished. It will scratch in the harsh salt air of the Eastern Seaboard and the arid winds of the Midwest, crack in the cold of the remaining Sierra snowcaps.

But for now the thing in front of him floats, displacing the air below it like a glass pillow. He reaches out one hand to touch it, so lightly that there are no fingerprints on its panels when he pulls away.

“You've never ridden one, have you?”

Jonathan shakes his head. “I've never left Industry City – until now, I mean.”

His voice is clipped and formal, as if he's answering only under requirement. Everett wonders how much he uses it anyway; they're not allowed to talk on the floor, and even if they were, the machines would be too loud to hear anything. But his face is raised for the first time, locked on the emerald filigree of the windows.

“How far does it go?” he asks.

“Coast to coast,” says Everett. “Twice daily.”

“This one's for people?”

“Five hundred at a time. A few permanent residents.”

“Permanent? Like the cargo cults?”

“Not on our line. It's mostly society, and they've got their own cars. Some of them probably older than I am.” _And definitely than you are_ , Everett adds internally.

Jonathan reaches up and traces the pattern of the shell, a weave with which he must be intimately familiar. But shut away in a box – like the men and women who stay alive by shuttling between tenement and factory in Industry City – it is only dead metal. The plant's lights wouldn't show off its subtle glow, nor its graceful defiance of gravity. For the first time, Everett sees Jonathan with something like a smile.

“It's...” he says, bringing his hand away, “I can see why the cults ride them. It's like magic.”

The smile is gone when they get back to the hansom, and Jonathan waits tensely when they pull up to Everett's apartments near sunset. Everett sees him through the door and into the main hall, to the spare bedroom he's recently started considering turning into another study, given how rarely he now has guests. He can't help but notice Jonathan's hand shaking as they get there, worrying at the wrist of his injured arm.

“Is the anesthetic all right?” he asks. “Should I get you some more...”

Jonathan shakes his head. “No, it's... I...” he stills his hands and straightens. “Whatever you want, just – just take it already.”

Everett looks at him curiously. Jonathan puts his good fingers to the buttons of his threadbare shirt and slides one open matter-of-factly, eyes pointed toward the bed and at nothing at all. The dots connect themselves, and Everett curses his blindness. No wonder he was so reluctant at the hospital and in the cab.

“Oh – no,” he says. “I – please, you don't need to say that. I told you, it's my trains you hurt yourself building, and the least I can do is help fix what I've broken.”

Jonathan takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have made it sound like that – been so crude. But I'll... I'll do what I need to pay you back.”

“There's nothing to pay back. I don't expect anything from you – except to heal. I'll find you some clothes tomorrow. For now... just get some rest. I'll be downstairs in the morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos! It's cool to have people reading this.


	4. Cassette Withdrawal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jonathan knows that pleasure is transient, nostalgia hurts forever, and Astor's library offers both.

Jonathan dreams of drowning. He wakes twisted in soft, thick blankets on a mattress that has begun to swallow him. The feeling of simultaneous fear and comfort – wanting to run and fall back to sleep at the same time – is one he is beginning to get accustomed to.

His crushed fingers have started up an itching, teeth-grating ache, and he remembers what Mr. Astor had said about the nails falling off – he's lost and grown a few in his life, and it's not a process he looks forward to. Except that Astor has access to anesthetics and who knows how many other things that will smooth the process.

Every one of them, though, would be a new line of debt. Astor may not have taken advantage of him last night, but that doesn't mean anything – maybe he wants to think of himself as a good man, earning Jonathan's affection. There will be nothing so transactional as the hotel, but a point nonetheless where he'll have to reciprocate.

His clothes are gone, a navy suit and dark shirt in their place. Jonathan dons them slowly and carefully, afraid he'll tear the delicate fabric. It's the softest clothing he's ever worn, if not the best-fitting; the outfit is made for someone taller and thicker, probably Astor himself. Or a servant – Jonathan hasn't seen them yet, but there must be staff in a place so large as this, he thinks as he makes his way down the spiral iron staircase and into the parlor.

“Did you sleep all right?”

Jonathan starts. Astor is folded into an uncomfortable-looking chair at one end of the room, in a dove-gray suit and matching tie.

“I – yes. I'm sorry – I hope you weren't waiting for me.”

“No, not at all. Only meditating.”

“On what?”

“Nothing, mostly. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work. In reality... it's hard not to think, isn't it?”

Jonathan nods, although he's not sure whether Astor is right or not. He's not sure whether his blunt reflex at the looms counts as thinking, or the mechanical routine of waking and dressing and walking the mile from apartment to factory and the beginning of the day, or vice versa at the end.

“Your hand must be hurting again. Let me get the pills.”

Jonathan waits awkwardly as Astor straightens and disappears down the long hallway, returning with an iridescent glass bottle. He shakes two capsules into his palm and holds them out. Jonathan takes them gingerly, touching Astor's skin as little as possible. They melt under his tongue, pain fading almost immediately in a pool of slightly fuzzy lethargy.

“There's toast in the dining room, under the hood.”

“It's all right. I'm not – ”

Astor raises his eyebrows wryly. “You've got to be starving. When was the last time you ate?”

Jonathan doesn't tell him, because it's almost certainly longer than he assumes – and longer still since he had hot food, like the warm bread and tomato Astor serves him. He can barely stop himself from taking the entire slice in a bite.

“Don't you have to be at...” _at work_ , he's about to ask, before he realizes that he has no idea what someone like Astor does or where he does it. The question itself seems almost insulting, as if he's questioning his actions. And anyway it should be him out looking for a factory that will take on someone with no references and an injured hand.

Astor only shakes his head lightly, as if he's heard the rest of the question and doesn't think much of it. “I just got back to the city,” he says. “I've got a month or so of staying around here, working out of my head for a little while – before some supplier needs me at a hub in the middle of nowhere, sorting out a new line to the Moon or whatever they want next.”

“You run – the Astor Line?” It's a stupid question, because with that name he could hardly do anything but run it. But Jonathan isn't sure if Astor thinks he knows anything about the line or not, the company whose name he sees so often on the factory placards.

“That I do,” Astor says. “Although at this point you could argue it runs itself. The computer probably knows my family better than I do – not even counting the members it's got on backup.” He hands Jonathan another slice of toast. “How long had you worked at Amalgamated?”

“I guess I don't know,” Jonathan says. “A few years. Since – ” _Since I met Morgan_ , he refrains from saying, although that's the best way of measuring the time. Since he met her on the line at the glass shop he'd worked before, and left so the management couldn't forbid them to see each other.

“I can put in a word for you if you want to go back, although I can't say they'd take it.”

“I'll find somewhere else.” He should have quit the moment his debt was paid, or at least tried, knowing that he had no other prospects and nobody to support him while he put the trust as far behind him as possible.

“Have you got a family? Wife?”

Astor won't know he's prodding at a wound that's still raw a year later. Jonathan makes a noncommittal noise that could be interpreted as assent, a lie even without words.

“We can figure it out in a few days,” Astor says. “You're still going to be a little out of it for the next couple, on those pills. Before you start healing and we take the dose down.”

“What do you...” Jonathan prepares again to learn what Astor's real motives are, why he's stayed home and dressed him and fed him. “What do you want me to do?”

Astor shrugs. “There's a library. Do you want some tapes?”

Jonathan shakes his head. He's tried them once or twice at arcades, cheap adventure cassettes glitchy from years of replay. The moments he remembers were of a soaring beauty so great that coming back to earth was like a blow to the face. He will already feel that enough, when he leaves Astor's apartment.

“Books too, if you want. Can you read?”

“Sort of.” He follows Astor through a hall lined with subtly moving portraits of men and women with varying degrees of Astor's dark eyes and broad cheekbones. The library's books all match, which is almost more extraordinary to Jonathan than their number. Everett picks one offhanded and passes it to him.

“This whole shelf's novels and stories, if you want to poke around. But this was one of my favorites growing up.” Astor smiles. “Don't worry, though; I won't be insulted if you don't like it.”

Jonathan picks out the gilt letters on the front: _The Pale Machines_. “I'll try it,” he says. “And I – thank you. Thank you – for all of it.”


	5. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Everett recalls that great hardship can produce great stories, but living according to stories can only end in tears.

Everett wonders, as the days pass, what he's going to do with Jonathan. It would be less pressing if he still stayed in the city, but the expansions send him farther for longer each time – he'd barely been joking about the moon. Being outside Industry City must be strange enough for the man, let alone to the plains or mountains where they founded new macro-complexes. And they would be hostile to him. Even dressed in the clothes that Everett has had altered to fit, there's something to him – a roughness, a starvation that goes beyond food – that will stop him from ever passing as society. He'll be snubbed at best, or arrested for presumed fraud when Everett turns his back, or beaten for some imagined slight.

When he inherited the Astor Line, Everett thought he understood power, thought he had it. He can construct anything he wants, can change the land itself to match his vision. But the longer he's at it, the more he understands that there are structures stronger than steel and weave, and that he can barely push at their edges. His mind isn't even large enough to wrap around the changes that it would take to give men like Jonathan Lem a life that anyone would value. He works because it is simpler and cheaper than automation, but he only works so long as he _remains_ cheaper, and more disposable, than a machine.

There are better places to work than Industry City, even better places to work in Industry City, but even that is an ecosystem that Everett can only upset so much: the gears of promotion and education and progression that keep the veneer of order and fairness intact.

He could keep him at the apartments indefinitely, he supposes, assign someone to watch over him. But before he even finishes the thought he knows how confining Jonathan would find it. It would strip him of what little control he has over his life, leave him without any remaining sense of purpose. He no longer is constantly vigilant around Everett, but Everett keeps a careful distance nonetheless, avoids anything that sounds like a direct order or a solicitation.

It's a delicacy he's unused to, all the harder when he manages to draw out the parts of Jonathan's personality that don't seem reflexively afraid of him. At their first dinner, Jonathan drains the tumbler Everett has handed over and tips it, looking for something at the bottom.

“That's funny,” he says. “I've never actually seen one of these finished.”

“What do you mean?” Everett asks.

“I made a step of them, back with – before the looms,” Jonathan says, holding it to the light. “This red stripe, right here. We only made them for one season. It's – ” he stops and puts the glass down, sneaking a last glance at it. “Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt a meal with something this boring. It must sound ridiculous to be excited about.”

“Not at all,” says Everett. “I'm sort of impressed.” He means it. He didn't even buy the tumblers – they'd been one of Anthony's whimsical purchases while they were still living together – but he takes a second look at their delicate glass, a multicolored lattice in the style of Anthony's favorite tape-painter at the time. “Does it look like you thought it would?”

Jonathan makes a low noise in his throat, as if he's biting back a sentence. “They're...”

“Oh come on, be honest,” Everett says.

Jonathan freezes, dropping his eyes. “I thought they'd be taller,” he says quietly. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound insincere.”

It's not until several hours later that Everett realizes that Jonathan thought he'd been chastising him for his hesitation. He should have remembered sooner, because it's exactly why he doesn't keep a staff: for all his parents' etiquette lessons, he never had any idea how to talk to them.

Now, Jonathan spends his days reading, a dictionary at one hand and his book, read a painstakingly growing portion of the way through, at the other.

“How is it?” Everett asks, coming to call him out for another meal.

Jonathan places a bookmark flat in the volume's leaves and folds it closed, arranging it at right angles with the table. “It's good,” he says. “I've just gotten to the water city.”

Everett nods. “You're almost to my favorite part, then.”

“What's that?”

“They come back to the surface – sorry, suppose I've given that part away now – but they get to the surface and find an island where people voted to keep sight and get rid of their other senses. To avoid confusion, mixed messages. Except for the renegade eye-traitors that live in the middle of nowhere in – what did they call it – in decadent sense-lust.”

“I'm not sure I've seen anything like this before.”

“She wrote it during the Razes. Died in them, as far as anyone knows.”

Jonathan's people can't have forgotten those years, even in the slums where memories are short. God knows they would have suffered more than anyone. When Everett had prepared to take over Astor the Razes had been a constant presence in the conversations between him and his parents, although they would never tell him about being born in the middle of them. Those experiences he had to find in tapes and books, in photographs of flooding cities and dying men and the trains running untouched between it all. He wonders if Jonathan has seen them too.

“My grandmother fought in the Razes,” Jonathan says slowly. “For the Crow's Fundamentalist Brigade.”

Now it's Everett who feels caught off-balance, remembering the historical prints of ruined monuments and burned books, the photographs of Joanna Crow presenting her devotees' children with toys made of teeth and hair and hacked-off fingers, smile broad and mad. “Why?” he asks.

“She used to tell us she got conscripted. But she was – she was mean, a mean woman. She always hated it when people had things she didn't.” He laughs. “I don't know how she got married, really.”

Everett heads to the dining room, with Jonathan following. He looks at the two places Everett has set at the table, as if for the first time.

“You don't always do this yourself, do you?” he asks hesitantly.

“Do what?”

“Set these. I should have helped.”

Everett waves him off. “I'm home so little. I like to play house when I am.”

“Have you... always lived alone?”

“ _I'm_ not married, if that's what you're talking about. Was for a year, once.”

“What happened?”

“He started a regional transportation competitor. It was all very Ayn Rand exciting for a while, but... well, she wrote supermen. We got tired.”

Everett watches Jonathan's face closely when he uses the masculine pronoun – even if he hadn't mentioned Crow, Industry City is a conservative place. But he registers only faint, neutral surprise. “What about you? I didn't take you away from someone, did I?”

If he weren't already paying attention, Everett thinks, he might have missed the sudden stutter of Jonathan's expression, the raw anger and sorrow that is hidden within moments. “No. I was engaged once. That's all.”

Everett wonders if he should stop. But the question has raised a boil that will only fester if it's left. “What happened?”

Jonathan takes a breath. “Her mother got sick, out in the country. She left to take care of her, until it was all over one way or another. Said I wouldn't be any use, when I offered to go. I let her take everything we had, take her engagement ring – she probably sold it, I guess, for medicine. And she never came back. I don't know how I'd find her now.”

Everett goes through the mental loop he does every time Jonathan tells him some cruel detail of his past: he wonders if he can track down the woman, reunite them, or at least tell Jonathan where she is. But life doesn't work like that, he knows, outside the tapes. His fiancée might be dead, might be ill, might be married herself. “What was her name?” he asks instead.

Jonathan looks past him. His eyes are dry, but they're also miles away. “Morgan. We'd have been together three years now.”

Without thinking, Everett breaks his rule of caution. He puts a hand on Jonathan's shoulder, feeling the bone and sinew even through his suit. Realizes that the man is trembling. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I'm so sorry.”

Jonathan neither leans into his touch nor pulls away. He only sits, rubbing his fingers methodically across his bandages. And for a second, he meets Everett's eyes willingly for the first time, looking at him with a curious intensity. “It's all right,” he says. “You're the first person who's asked.”


	6. Histories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jonathan learns that desire works differently outside the panopticon of wage labor.

He doesn't blame Morgan, Jonathan thinks later that night in bed. They had always known that their love was molded around the sharp corners of each other's lives, wearing away at the wrong moments. Wherever she is – if she is anywhere at all – he hopes that she escaped the gristmill of Industry City for good. That she found a trade, or married well, or did anything at all except end up where he did, left to be chewed up by the machines.

If they had lived like he is now – with a room to himself and clothes that are always clean and hours to do nothing but read and talk – if they had lived like that, they could have made it, he thinks. But that's dangerous to imagine. Astor is dangerous, treating him like he's worth something. And that's if he is as benevolent as he seems. If beneath the pleasant, confident voice and kind words, he's not still biding his time.

Even if he is, though, it will almost have been worth it. No one has helped him for so long, touched him with anything that seems like sympathy. Touched him at all in a way that he could stand. Or, he thinks, that he wouldn't mind repeating.

It's his last coherent thought before he drifts asleep.

He wakes to bright April sun. His hand still hurts, but it's manageable. And it's only as noticeable as it is because a web of hard knots that he hadn't realized existed – that he had thought only part of his body's intrinsic form – have begun to melt all through the muscles of his back and arms. Part of him is bothered by this softness, but part can't help but enjoy the novelty of the sensation. This is how it must feel to be society, to be fully human. This is how Everett Shao-Astor must feel.

Right now, Everett Shao-Astor is in the parlor, taking notes in a black pad like the ones Jonathan's seen foremen using. Himself, he's only used the large, boxy computers in the lobby of the tenement, and only to conduct the simplest of business. Astor's pad is sleek and dark, a polished slab of pure glass. As Jonathan approaches, he lowers it and smiles. “How's the hand?”

“It must be almost okay, isn't it?” He's unwrapped and rewrapped it every day, and the nails have finally peeled off entirely, leaving his fingertips raw and naked. But he knows it's only a matter of time until they grow back, and then he'll leave. He'll leave, and he'll find a job, and all the stiffness will slowly seep back into his body.

But Astor doesn't answer. “There'll be guests soon,” he says. “Just for a few hours.”

Jonathan nods.

“I'll introduce you. Lydia Warwick and her husband. She's on half the advisory boards of the city, and he's... he's a dilettante, I suppose. A nice one, though.”

Jonathan doesn't recognize the word, and he doesn't know what to say in response. The last thing he wants is to meet these people, but he can't refuse – Astor has asked so little of him. So he only picks up _The Pale Machines_ and waits.

He's nearly forgotten they're coming by the time there's a ring at the door. Lydia Warwick is a tall woman who seems even taller in her stiff-shouldered suit dress, and David has sandy hair and a brocade jacket that looks like it should be in one of the factory's old train brochures, thrown over the faded shoulder of a long-ago passenger. He smiles briefly but affably at Jonathan as Astor introduces them, before looking down to the decanter on the bar behind him.

Lydia Warwick doesn't smile, not at first. When Astor brings them together, her eyes catch on his face and stay there, sliding down his body slowly and making their way back up. She puts out a hand that Jonathan takes awkwardly with his good one, but it's to Astor that she speaks.

“I didn't realize you had a... partner again,” she says. “How did you meet?”

Astor stiffens, and Jonathan thinks he sees a hint of red on his cheeks. “Oh, no, I'm sorry. Mr. Lem's a ward, temporarily. He injured himself in my employ.”

“Your employ?”

“I was on the looms,” Jonathan says quickly and nervously. “It was my fault, just a slip. Mr. – Mr. Shao-Astor saved me.”

Warwick raises her eyebrows but lets whatever she might have planned to say dissolve. “Then you're from Industry City? I keep an apartment there sometimes.” She smiles slyly. “We could be neighbors.”

Astor ushers them to the sitting room, David Warwick with a glass in hand. Lydia gives Jonathan one final look before she turns the corner, and then he retreats to the corner study, alone with his book.

He's past the water city, past the eye-traitors, to a forest of glass pyramids that weep in the rain. He wonders how many of the landscapes might exist in places or times he's simply never heard of – before the Razes, far outside the slums. He's never felt confined in Industry City, with its maze of alleys and apartment towers that leave the ground in shadow. But now that he's out, its fractal density no longer seems so complex. Even going on the short walks he's taken with Astor has opened a new world to him.

Not all of the world might be good, he thinks, as he hears the swish of skirts. Lydia Warwick's hand is cold against his neck, the opposite of Astor's reassuring touch. She murmurs in his ear.

“Are you really from the factories?”

“Yes. Why?”

She laughs. “Because you clean up well. And, tell me... is there really nothing going on between you and Everett? I find that even harder to believe.”

Jonathan feels his face flush. “Nothing,” he says. “That's – I'll be gone as soon as my hand's healed. That's all.”

She winds her hand down to the bandages and picks at them, pressing until he winces. Her closeness reminds him of the silver-haired man at the factory, or of the handful of women who paid to come and take him while he was chained in the hotel. As slowly and inoffensively as he can manage, Jonathan slips out from under her grip. She gives him one last stroke on the face, and then she is gone.

He buries himself in reading but can't make it more than a few words at a time without having to go back and start all over again. Astor has to know Lydia Warwick, Jonathan thinks, has to trust her. He's too rich to need to invite over anyone he doesn't like.

The sun is setting by the time he hears the Warwicks leave. He puts down _The Pale Machines_ , still amid the pyramids, as footsteps approach.

“I'm awfully sorry about that,” Astor says. “I hope you were all right on your own.”

Jonathan doesn't mention the visit from Lydia Warwick. He only smiles, as best he can. “It was fine. I – I wouldn't have known what to say to them anyway.”

Astor laughs. “Oh, that's easy, you'd figure out banter in no time. They're coming back tomorrow anyway, you can try then if you want. Want a drink?” He's got the decanter in one hand, a glass in the other. When Jonathan nods hesitantly, he disappears for a moment and comes back with a second one, sitting on the divan beside him.

“I don't... guess you drink much?” Astor asks. “You might want to go slow.”

Jonathan holds the glass up – it's not one he made, unfortunately – and admires the ruby shadows it casts on the table below. He manages to take the first burning sip cleanly and quietly. “What is it?”

“A kind of grappa,” Astor says, another word that means nothing. “A brandy.”

The deeper he drinks, the smoother the brandy is, and the less immediate the memory of a cold hand on his neck feels. Astor can tell him the exact history of the bottle from memory, referring to places as mystical as any pyramid forest. He knows a lot of histories, he says.

“That's what my family always thought they made,” Astor says, refilling his glass. “Stories. The trains were an afterthought.” Jonathan lets him continue, basking in the warmth that has trickled down his veins instead of blood. “It's nonsense, obviously. No one remembers any of the epic journeys they thought people would be writing songs about for decades – nobody except me, I suppose.”

“Somebody has to have written it down, right?”

“Sure, probably. Central computer's the only one that cracks their backups, but I've got a whole shelf in the library devoted to the cassettes they recorded every time they launched a new line. Breaking champagne over the first car's bow and everything. But everyone thinks they're exciting enough to have someone read their diaries when they're dead. Most people aren't, and my aunts and grandparents – as much as I loved them – were no exception.”

“Do you keep one?”

Astor grins. “A diary? Of course I do. Better safe than sorry.” He leans closer to Jonathan and pours another glass. “I should get you one, if you're all right writing with your hand. You'd have a hell of a lot more to say than any of my relatives.”

Jonathan shakes his head. “And write what, my Amalgamated shift numbers?”

“I'm not talking about a log book every day. But you must have stories about your grandmother, I mean. Or the looms. Or – or Morgan.”

The thought makes Jonathan flinch. Thinking the whole thing through is painful enough; putting it down on paper – taking the hours he knows he would need to handle a single page – is inconceivable. Astor seems to notice his look.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “I shouldn't have. It's just – there's something romantic about you. It deserves preservation.”

Jonathan looks at the floor, unsure what to say. When he raises his head again, moving to set his empty glass – whose contents have left the world glossy around the edges – on the table, Astor leans in and kisses him.

He is confident, in this moment, that Astor won't hurt him if he stops this. But strangely, he doesn't want to. Instead, he fumbles the glass down and deepens the kiss, as Astor pulls him closer with surprising strength. Jonathan puts a hand to the face in front of him, its skin as soft as he knew it would be, and lets Astor lay him slowly on the divan's cushions, lips still on his. Dizzy, he doesn't trust himself to touch Astor's clothes without tearing them, but he arches his back and makes it easier for Astor to loosen his jacket, to expertly slide open one button after another. They come off easily, and Astor moves his fingers to his own tie and shirt.

His skin is hot on Jonathan's own, hands in his hair, down his chest. Jonathan realizes that he's not sure what to do – he and Morgan did this fumbling in locked closets and temporarily empty tenement rooms, breathless and always a little frightened. He's never had anyone touch him with this assurance, felt so enveloped in their grasp. He hopes it's too dark to see the scars that he knows still line his body, reminders of his paid-off debts.

As if sensing his confusion, Astor puts his lips to Jonathan's ear. “We don't have to do this,” he whispers. “We can--” Jonathan stops him with another kiss.

One of Astor's hands wanders lower. Jonathan becomes hyper-aware, almost frightened, of his own arousal. He tenses as Astor unbuttons his suit pants and slides them down, and for a moment he's back at the factory, waiting for some faceless man to strip him.

But Astor leans down and kisses his neck instead, and then his shoulder, stroking the fine hairs of his chest. He works his way down, pressing his fingers to the curve of Jonathan's hip. When he finally takes him into his mouth, Jonathan grasps at the thick linen cushions beneath him, already at the knife edge of orgasm. Astor pauses, teasing him, drawing his pleasure out until his thoughts are only white noise. His body convulses as he comes, closing his eyes and feeling Astor's hands slide back up his body, lifting his head.

Astor smiles. “This is why you write,” he says, as Jonathan pulls him close and runs a hand down his back, taking in the feel of Astor's ribs, his hipbones – every part that he needs to learn, while they're still together. “So you can remember nights like this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again! Everyone. For reading.


	7. All Your Well-Learned Politesse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lydia Warwick shows Jonathan that social grace and blithe entitlement can prove as frightening as brute strength.

Jonathan doesn't remember going to bed, but he wakes up there the next morning, half-dressed with his shirt and jacket hung on the bedpost. His head hurts, and it takes him a moment to remember where he is. It takes only another moment to panic. He can't have let his guard down last night like he remembers, let the man who's fed him and treated his wounds do even more for him. Let himself form even such a tenuous bond with someone who he'll soon never see again, who he'll try to forget the way he did Morgan.

He washes quickly and goes downstairs, prepared to apologize. But the first person he runs into isn't Astor, but David Warwick.

David looks at him uncomfortably, tugging at the ends of his velvet ascot. They avoid each other's eyes for a few seconds, until Jonathan sees Astor enter the parlor, Lydia Warwick behind him.

Astor smiles at them both, not the warm, intimate smile of last night but something pleasant and businesslike. “Want to join us for lunch?” he asks, and Jonathan realizes he must have slept later than he realized. He shakes his head. “I'll be in the study,” he mumbles, turning his back before Astor can say anything else.

It's too difficult to concentrate on the words of his book, so he flips to the map in the front and looks blankly over its symbols, rendered in fine etching. He's wondering if he'll have time to finish it before his hand heals when he hears Lydia Warwick's voice behind him.

“ _The Pale Machines_? I adored that book.”

Jonathan flinches. She closes the door behind her and pulls up a chair, crossing her ankles in their delicate fawn boots.

“One of my girlfriends had the map framed on her wall, you know, in college,” she says. She leans close to him, until he can smell her perfume like flowers on a grave. “It's a classic.”

Jonathan wonders why she isn't back with Astor in the dining room. “Where are...”

“Oh, they went out for a smoke – I never took up the habit. I asked if I might come back here instead and see you.”

She puts a finger to the edge of the book and flips it closed, laying her hand over his as she plucks it out and places it on the table. She cups the other under his chin and guides his eyes toward hers, arms stronger than they look in their tight satin blouse.

“You've got nice eyes,” she says – it should sound like a compliment but feels more like an appraisal. “Come closer.”

He doesn't dare refuse her. She traces his collar and loosens it, the cold, polished smile never leaving her face. “Tell me the truth,” she says. “Do you let him fuck you?”

Jonathan freezes. She inclines her head coquettishly, raising an eyebrow. “I thought so. I suppose he saved you from... a life of sin? You'll have to tell me all about it.”

Her hands are working roughly at his shirt now, stretching the thread on the buttons until he worries they'll break. She pulls it open, and he sees his chest in the hard light of midday, the dead white lines that the man's knife left on his skin a year ago. He can tell from the look in her eyes that she sees them too, even before she runs a thumb down one of them, sliding it to inscribe a circle around his nipple.

“Yes,” she murmurs. “I'll want to hear all about it. But first – get on your knees.”

She says it without even command, as though she's asking him to fetch a glass of water or lower the blinds. When he doesn't move, she puts her hand to his hair and yanks him forward, until he hisses with pain and falls at her feet. She rearranges her skirts and forces his head under them, keeping a vice grip on his neck.

What did Astor think she wanted, if he let her come back here? Maybe he gave himself up too easily last night, Jonathan thinks – maybe he suggested that he's available for anyone at a price. She squeezes her hand harder, momentarily choking him. “Go on,” she coaxes. “Now.”

He has no choice but to slide his tongue across the folds between her legs, to struggle to breathe as she pulls him even closer. She moans and he closes his eyes, humiliated at being forced to pleasure her. “God, yes,” she says. “Has he had you like this? He must have.”

She makes him lick her until she climaxes, skin warm and slippery. He tries to slip away, but she laughs and pushes him to the floor, tearing his shirt the rest of the way off. “Now,” she says. “Now, you tell me a story.”

When he says nothing, she grabs his bandaged hand and squeezes. It's not the injury that makes him talk so much as the fear. Everett is the only person who could stop her from doing whatever she wants to him, and Everett is the one who's sent her back – expecting, for all Jonathan knows, for her to use him.

He tries to leave out the worst details, but she slowly draws the truth from his halting sentences. She takes the rest of his clothes off as he tells her about the man and his knife, about the hours of cruelty. She straddles him, squeezing her thighs around him as if he's a prize horse, until she gets him hard and surrounds him.

Even if she weren't forcing him to relive his hell, this would seem all too familiar. It's only her hands pinning his wrists down, not the biting steel manacles, only Astor's hardwood floor and not the cheap mattress. But the effect, the degradation, is the same. When he stops speaking she slaps him, and when he starts again she bites at his neck and ear, whispering insults.

“You must have liked it sometime, though,” she tells him, thrusting onto him until he gasps. “Like you like this, don't you?”

Tears come to his eyes despite his best efforts. “Please,” he whispers. “Please stop.”

She ignores him. Maybe she never heard him at all, maybe she only pays attention when he answers a question that she's asked.

“How does Everett like you?” she asks, mockingly. “How – ”

“What the hell is going on?”

Lydia Warwick stops at the sound of Astor's voice, wrenching Jonathan's head back so hard he nearly chokes. She pushes herself off him, and he curls onto himself, putting a hand to his face and rubbing out the tears that have gathered on his cheeks. He only half-hears Lydia's arch excuses, or her departure, because all he can think is that no matter how different Astor seems to the men who made money off his prone, pain-wracked body, nothing has really changed.


	8. Mobile Vulgaris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Everett wishes that catastrophic failures of _noblesse oblige_ could carry punishment.

Astor's first impulse is disappointment when he sees Lydia and Jonathan on the study floor. He can understand it, he supposes; if Jonathan has never been with a man before, maybe he feels threatened, anxious, even if Lydia Warwick is the last person he'd think he might choose. But as she straightens her skirts, he sees that Jonathan's eyes are blank, and he's pulling away from her, hands shaking as he tries to gather his clothes. Everett's sadness turns to fury, and he takes Lydia's arm and escorts her carefully out of the room.

“What did you do?” he says flatly, quietly.

“What do you care?” Her lips are still flushed, her hair slightly askew. “He's only a prole.”

“This is my house,” Everett says, leaning close. “Whatever your ugly opinions about the worth of other human beings, do not exercise them here.”

He can't afford to say everything he wants to right now, and Lydia is far too powerful for him to entertain any notions of legal justice. He isn't even sure David would be surprised by her indiscretions. All Everett can do is force a toothy, vicious smile and hand her her coat.

“You said he wasn't yours,” Lydia says, taking but not donning it. “Apologies if I stepped on your toes.”

Everett turns until he's facing her directly. “Tell me the truth,” he says. “Did you think for a moment that he wanted what you did to him?”

Lydia's dark eyes betray nothing. “Low-class men are always up for it,” she says curtly. She slips her coat on in a series of careful tugs, fixing its buckles, and calls for David. “If they had self-control, they wouldn't be poor, would they? In a few days, I doubt he'll even remember.”

Everett hurries them out the door with the same toothy smile, nodding politely when David bids him best wishes.

Jonathan is half-dressed when he comes back, but still on the floor, hands around his knees. Everett pulls up a chair and gestures toward it, preparing to apologize.

“I'm sorry,” Jonathan says.

“What? What do you mean?”

Jonathan rises slowly, still shirtless. It's the first time Everett has seen his body so clearly, but he can't appreciate it. His eyes are stuck on the spiderweb of scars across Jonathan's torso, healed but shiny.

“I shouldn't have... made a scene,” he says. “I shouldn't have been alone with her. She just walked in, and I should have known...” his voice cracks, and he stops, slumping on the chair.

“My god, Jonathan, what could I possibly blame you for? It's my fault, for letting her see you when she asked. Lydia Warwick's a shark everywhere else, I just never thought she'd do... something like this.” There would have been no way out once she approached, Everett thinks, not for someone like Jonathan. Even if he could overcome years of being ground into unconditional obedience, he could never risk hurting a society woman.

Despite his best efforts, Everett finds himself looking at the scars again. Jonathan catches his eyes and looks down with uncharacteristic anger. “She just finished making me tell her about them,” he spits. “Want me to start over?”

Everett shakes his head, taken aback. “I swear, you will never see her again,” he says. “And you don't have to tell me anything you don't want to.” He finds Jonathan's shirt on the floor, carefully drapes it across his shoulders. “I will never, ever let anyone else hurt you.”

Jonathan draws his arms through the sleeves. Everett wants to see the man he did last night, innocent and undone. But he has no right to, especially when he has so little idea what the rest of Jonathan's ecosystem – the factories, society, everything that has gotten Everett where he is – has done to him. Whatever Everett feels, it's not as if he can promise him commitment beyond a few more weeks of company, before he's called off on some trip or other.

“I don't belong here,” Jonathan says. “My hand's almost healed. I should go.”

“You...” _Please, don't let this be the last thing we do,_ Everett wants to tell him. But despite his best intentions, he's tried to save this man and only ended up putting him in harm's way again. “You can leave tomorrow, if you want. It should be fine as long as you treat it gently.”

Everett opens the small wall safe by his desk. He takes out a few bills and folds them, placing them on the table. “You can put yourself up for a few weeks, while you get back on your feet. I can make sure the last plant gives you references. I... just... think it over tonight, will you? Make sure this is what you want to do.”

Jonathan takes the banknotes carefully, as though they might fracture in his hands, and folds them into his shirt pocket. He's not shaking anymore, Everett notices, although he's just gone deadly still instead. He reaches out and flips open a book on the table – _The Pale Machines_ , Everett knows without looking – and reads silently. Everett watches for a moment, until he is fairly sure that Jonathan isn't ignoring him on purpose.

“Take that too,” says Everett. “I'll get another copy.”

“Thank you,” says Jonathan. “And... I'm sorry, I must sound awful and ungrateful.”

“Of course you don't,” Everett says. “I just wish you could stay longer.”

They read in silence until dinner – or Jonathan reads, at least. Everett pulls out his notepad and pretends, to himself and anyone watching, that he is checking quality control lists for his latest line. But he keeps half an eye on Jonathan, taking in as much as he can before he loses him forever.

Jonathan barely eats, but Everett doesn't push him, only sneaks glances and imagines creative ways to financially and politically ruin Lydia Warwick. They're all fantasy, and none of them half as attractive as the fantasy of reaching over the table and kissing the man across from him, of seeing the look of hesitant, modest surprise that Jonathan gets whenever Everett can make his life a little better. So much for that.

Jonathan stabs his fork into a round of scallop and worries it, looking up for the first time. “I'm – I'm sorry about what I said earlier,” he says. “About the scars.”

“I told you, you don't need to be sorry about anything. You don't owe me information you'd rather not give.”

“No, I... you ought to know. I should have told you before last night.” He taps his hand nervously against the outlay of silverware that he still mostly ignores at their meals, picking up an unused oyster fork and rolling it between his fingers. “I told you about Morgan anyhow. But I should've said that the ring she took – they made me work it off anyway, at Amalgamated. But not _at_ Amalgamated – not at the looms anyway. They own a lot of things I mean, and some of them – some of the places – I mean in Industry City still but – ” Jonathan keeps interrupting himself until Everett can barely follow his words, and can only pay attention to the white-knuckled grip he's got on the fork with his good hand, as he drives its tines slowly into the bandages of the other.

“Really, you don't have to – ”

“What I mean is that there were a lot of people who wanted to do... what she did. And some of them a lot worse.” Jonathan's hand is shaking now, and the fork slips, yanking at his bandages in a way that must hurt but that he doesn't seem to notice. His eyes are glassy as he continues in a near-whisper. “The cuts weren't even bad, compared to everything else. They're just what stuck around. I thought he was going to kill me. Then I _wished_ he'd...” his voice cracks and he presses his hand tightly over his eyes, fingertips sweeping over them to catch the tears. “The things they did... I shouldn't even have let you touch me, because I can't do them again. I'm going to have disappointed you.”

“Jonathan, I'm not – I liked last night. I wasn't disappointed. I thought you had too.”

Jonathan shakes his head, momentarily animated, until he covers his eyes again. “No, I – God, no, I did. I just...”

Everett can't stand seeing him slumped in the severe kitchen chair. He gets up and puts an arm around Jonathan, guiding him to one of the sitting room couches, and stays beside him as he keeps perfectly still and silent, moving only to clear his eyes.

It takes Everett a few moments of that silence to piece together Jonathan's disjointed explanation and match it against what he knows of the Amalgamated trust, and of the rumored affinities of the people in their circles – mobsters, as far as anyone in society is concerned. That's perhaps too convenient a separation, he thinks, remembering Lydia Warwick murmuring _I keep an apartment there sometimes._

It takes him a moment longer to figure out the last statement, and he's rewarded with his usual frustration whenever Jonathan apologizes for being hurt, as though his trauma is a selfish inconvenience. Even that's not his fault. It's something that foremen and bosses must have drilled into him for years, up to the moment that Everett met him. And this... it's not enough that they marked his body; they had to scar the the few pleasures he could have with reminders of his ordeal.

Jonathan has stopped crying, and for a second, Everett feels him lean into his grasp, as though he's going to bury his face in Everett's shirt. But he stops abruptly and pulls himself from Everett's arm, holding his posture straight like they're having a formal conversation.

“I think I should go to bed,” Jonathan says, and Everett ignores the fact that it's barely past dark. “Sure,” he replies, trying to mimic Jonathan's reserve. “We'll talk about everything tomorrow.”

Maybe it's better this way, because it gives him a few more hours to think up a kind of companionship that Jonathan will accept.


	9. Shocking Sensation Stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jonathan finds walking out of a good neighborhood more dangerous than walking into a bad one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Er, welcome to the chapter that is basically whump? I'm a monster.

Jonathan doesn't undress when he goes upstairs after dinner. He searches his room for the clothes he left the factory in and puts them on, sits on the bed until he's sure Astor is asleep. The well-cut jacket he keeps against the chill of night; he's sure Astor will understand. He double-checks the money, which is far more than he needs, and slips downstairs to the study, gathering the leather-bound copy of _The Pale Machines_. He wraps it in the case from one of his pillows upstairs, the only thing he can think of for a cover. Putting it under his arm, he feels his way blindly through the darkened apartments, and to the door.

Any moment now, he expects to run into Astor, indignantly asking what he's doing. Hopefully Astor will know not to come looking for him if he leaves like this, not to try to offer favors that he won't know what to do with. He'll be able to slip back to a new tenement and a new factory and remove himself from the sphere of anyone richer, and therefore more dangerous, than himself. Still, part of him is hoping he'll have woken him up somehow, that he'll be forced into at least seeing him one more time. Even if it's the stupidest thing he could do to get any more attached. 

But nothing happens, and he slips out unaccosted into the night.

He realizes belatedly that he doesn't know how to get back to Industry City by foot, or to anywhere that will take him there via streetcar. At night Astor's whole district is a maze of hedge and high fences, its townhouses blocking out even the downtown lights. Thank god he's the only person on the streets right now, and probably will be for hours.

Or, at least, he is until he turns a corner and falls into a pool of light from a policeman's lamp.

The man and his partner flash brief conciliatory smiles, but then their eyes go from his fine jacket to his coarse trousers and boots, the wrapped book. Their eyes narrow, and the smiles tighten.

“Doing anything in particular, this time of night?” one of them asks.

Jonathan shakes his head. He's not sure what he can say, and it might be better not to open his mouth at all, in case they place his factory accent.

“Come here.”

He can't run either, not without signing his own arrest warrant. Maybe they'll just scare him, send him on his way.

He approaches, warily. The first, taller officer grabs his arms and pulls them behind him, letting the book fall to the ground. The other picks it up and unwraps it, until its leather binding is exposed. “This isn't yours, is it?” he asks, grinning now. Jonathan doesn't answer, and the man raises an eyebrow theatrically and puts it aside. He roughly pats down Jonathan's pockets until he finds the stiff square of cash. “And neither is this, I'll bet.”

Jonathan is trying to figure out a way to respond when the man drives a fist into his stomach, doubling him over. He's saved from collapsing by the bruising fingers around his arms. “So where'd you break into, now?”

Jonathan shakes his head. “No, I didn't – ”

The next punch hits his face and sets his ears ringing. The man who's holding him clips his wrists into thick cuffs, and they push him into the back of a police wagon, leaving him to brace himself against its walls as it hums to life. He curses himself for thinking that his luck could hold out this long, or that he could protect himself any better than Astor could. He isn't stupid; he isn't naïve. His choices are just too limited to always make a good one.

The wagon swerves, and he hits his temple on a wheel-well, and then he has no choices to make at all.

He comes to when the doors open, and two pairs of hands grab his arms and drag him out into the bright light. They haul him, stumbling, to a counter with a terminal. “What's your name?”

Jonathan tells them. There'll be no police records on him, only the notice of his employment and discharge at the looms, if even that. They should be snapping a photo of him – he's seen enough arrest scenes in _Shocking Sensation Stories_ and _The Fate of Criminals_ and other cheap terminal comics. But they only hurry him past booking and into the kind of narrow interrogation room that the comics also love. And there, the similarities end.

They take the cuffs off and tell him to remove his shoes. They unbutton his jacket carefully, brushing away the dust that it collected in the wagon. They relax their painful hold on him long enough to slide it off his shoulders and hang it on a hook by the metal door. The tall officer looks him up and down carefully, as if searching for anything else that seems too nice to belong to him. He reaches close, unfixing the top button of Jonathan's shirt. Then he shakes his head slightly and rips it open from top to bottom instead, cheap threads snapping under his grip. He pulls it off and pushes Jonathan against the wall, one hand around his neck. The other wanders down Jonathan's ribs and to the waistband of his pants, unfastening them and stripping him completely.

Jonathan closes his eyes as he feels the man kneading the inside of his thigh, squeezing his throat until it hurts to swallow. The man's fist curls up again, and this time it hits him squarely in the chest, knocking his breath out of him. “So where'd you get them?” the man asks.

Jonathan shakes his head, and the officer hits him again in the same place, setting him gasping for air. He's physically incapable of talking when the question is repeated, but the man doesn't seem to care. He catches him lower in the ribs, and then the stomach, letting him fall as he starts to retch with pain. There's no food to bring up, so Jonathan only braces himself against the floor and tries to get control of himself.

The officer kicks him in the side until he falls flat on the floor, then hauls him up again, their faces only inches apart. Jonathan sees the man's eyes drop to his bandaged hand with a cruel smile.

“What happened here?”

He pulls the bandages off, and Jonathan thinks he sees a moment of hesitation when the man reveals his fingertips, still scabbed where the nails should be. Then he takes it and squeezes until Jonathan cries out.

“That's an awfully clean wrap for a prole thief,” the officer says. “Let me just take another look – ”

He dislocates the first finger neatly, and Jonathan screams. The second officer has grabbed his other arm, holding him in place as he tries to wrench free. He hates being so exposed under their gaze, only able to swear at them with as much ferocity as he can manage.

The tall one grabs his jaw and forces him to look up, still clutching Jonathan's injured hand. “I had a kid like you last week,” he says. “Pretty boy. We worked him over all night – knocked every damn tooth out of his head. Is that what you want?”

Another finger goes, and Jonathan's vision goes dim. “No!” he says. “No, no I... don't.”

“Then where'd you get the money?”

“A gift. A man named Everett Shao-Astor gave it to me – you can phone his house, he'll tell you.” He doesn't want to bring Astor in to this, but he can't think of any other way out.

“A gift? For...” The officer lets the insinuation hang in the air. Jonathan doesn't contradict him – it's not even technically wrong, he supposes.

“Just call him,” he begs.

“I'm not waking up a good society man in the middle of the night to ask about a whore,” the man says. His breath is hot on Jonathan's neck. “Give me a demonstration and maybe you'll convince me.”

The man pushes Jonathan to his knees, letting his injured hand drop. Jonathan knows better than to believe that they'll let him go, but at least it will buy some time, and there are worse things they could do to him. If he refuses, he has no doubt that they'll do them.

Jonathan puts his good hand on the man's zipper and undoes it, feeling for his cock. He's hard already – maybe he has been since the beating started – and he groans when Jonathan pulls it out and puts his tongue to work. He lets Jonathan ease him slowly into his mouth with as much skill as he can manage. The man runs his hand down the back of his neck and circles his throat, thrusting into him abruptly and painfully, but Jonathan manages to keep from gagging.

He tries to focus on listing every factory he could look for work at when he gets back to Industry City, who and where might let him board while he's waiting. If they do let him go, he won't have the money Astor gave him. He'll have to find a job that will take him with splinted fingers, and hope that the officers haven't broken any ribs too painfully for him to work.

The man works him hard and comes with one final, hard jerk of Jonathan's neck. He looks over his head at the other officer. “Want to try him out too?”

The second officer wants to slap him around before, and Jonathan takes the abuse in silence, waiting until the man pulls his pants open and orders him to suck. For a terrible, traitorous moment he remembers the man's long-ago offer to let him sell his body at the mill, and wonders if he'll be too badly injured for anyone else to take him. He reminds himself of his promise to die before going back, and tells himself that this, here at the station, is different – he at least wants to die on his own terms, and his own time.

When it's over, the first officer says exactly what Jonathan expects him to: “Who'd pay this much money for something like you? Come on, just admit it. It'll be easy.”

It would be easy, he thinks as the man kicks him to the ground and holds him there with one boot. But they would have no reason to call Astor, not even any reason to give him a trial. He'll have confessed to breaking into a society house, whether he says it's Astor's or someone else's, and they'll jail him for it at best, mutilate him at worst – he's heard of hands cut off, legs crushed, for these slights.

He expects them to pull him up and hit him again, but instead he hears the door open, his body still pinned down too tightly to turn and look. The man who's left when it closes gives Jonathan's back one final dig and turns him over with his foot, leaving him staring straight up at the blinding fluorescent light.

“We're gonna do,” says the man, “a hell of a lot worse to you than we've already done. Is it gonna be worth it?”

Is it going to have been? Jonathan wonders. Is it going to have been worth it to meet Astor, to have a few weeks of what feels, compared to everything that came before, like bliss? He doubts it, but he can't quite bring himself to say no.

He doesn't get a chance to answer either way. He gasps, startled, as a bucket of water splashes his bloodied face and chest. One of them squats in front of him and presses a set of metal mandibles to his skin, and he screams again. It feels like it's tearing his body apart fiber by fiber, unwinding him like a skein of flesh. He can't remember how to breathe, and his muscles move in directions he never knew they could, insofar as he is aware of them at all. They stop and his body goes limp, his eyes barely able to see through tears.

The men looks at him expectantly. Jonathan begs – begs them to believe him, to call Astor, to just not hurt him for a moment more. They find another patch on his skin and start again, until he's not even coherent enough to understand what he's saying in the time between shocks. They don't bother to hold him down during these times, because he can't move except to shake with residual pain.

After a while they no longer seem to enjoy it; their questions and their jabs at him seem perfunctory, and they grumble things to each other that he can't hear. Until they rip a few final screams from him and stop, the prod clattering to the floor beside his head.

“Getting goddamn late,” one of them says. “We might as well leave him with the boys in the pen, can always have somebody call up Mister Shao-Astor if he's still kicking in the morning. Easier than worrying about a confession now.”

The other laughs and grabs Jonathan by both arms, dragging him half-conscious to the door. “Big fucking _if_ , there.”

Jonathan can't follow anything they say after that, although he gets to his feet long enough to stumble down the hall with their arms under his. He's pushed into a room only a little larger than the first, seeing a flash of buttonless shirts and laceless boots as he falls.

He raises his head as the door closes behind him, watching the men approach. For a moment he hopes that someone will help him up, wipe the blood from his lip and the places where the officers' boots have caught his skin. For a briefer, more delusional moment he hopes that Astor will be here to save him somehow, to straighten his fingers and wrap his hand and give him some more of the pills to melt his pain.

But he knows better. The officers have made him prey, thrown him naked and broken at the feet of men who approach him with lewd, mocking curiosity. The first descends on him and is called away by a half-dozen voices, insisting that they all get a fair chance. Someone produces something like dice – Jonathan hears them hit the floor behind him – and the winner drags him to a wall in the corner and takes him against it, cursing him when he is unable to keep himself on his feet.

He slips to his knees when the man is done with him, knowing that he has a few minutes to rest at most. The next in line only pushes him to the ground, putting weight on his bruised and tired body that nearly makes him pass out. Jonathan wonders what number he could put to this man in his long list of unwilling lovers, the people who have gotten off on their control over him. They taught him years ago, in the looms, that his body was a precarious and substandard version of a machine. But it's his flesh's precarity that these men and women desire, their ability to make him scream and bleed and tremble. They want sex they can _take_ from him, leave him lesser.

Morgan, Astor, the things he's done with them have felt as though they were making something – not love, perhaps, but something that left them both with more than they arrived bearing. He wonders if this is so rare as it seems, that it would make up such a fraction of his experience.

Jonathan feels someone else put a hand on his shoulder, roll him onto his back. He spits in their face, the most resistance he can offer. They squeeze his disfigured hand in retaliation, and he screams, vision going black and nausea rolling over him. He still feels the pain of the man on him, but it is distant, fragmented. The police expect these men to kill him, he has gathered that much – to beat the last life out of his body in pursuit of their pleasure. Maybe this is what it's like to die. It's what he wonders as every minute passes, and the men fuck him one after the other, one pain blending into the next.

“You think they'll clean him up for us tomorrow?” he hears one of them ask another as he is crushed to the cement again.

“You see how hard they done him, before they brought him in? Usually means they've got no evidence. If he's not hurt too bad, anybody cares about him, they'll probably get him out first thing. If not...” the man laughs. “I doubt they'll want to waste the energy on fixing him up.”

Astor has cared about Jonathan the way a decent person would care; it's a rare enough thing on its own, but an impersonal one. Jonathan wonders if they might have had more if he'd stayed – if Astor could care for him the way he and Morgan had cared for each other, at the end. He shouldn't delude himself, he knows. But delusions couldn't possibly hurt more than everything else.


	10. Circles of Law Enforcement Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is no ethical emotion under capitalism.

Everett forces himself not to crack the door to Jonathan's room to check if he's still there when he wakes in the morning. He goes downstairs as he always does, pad in hand, and places a slice of freshly delivered bread into the oven for toast. He spreads butter over it in even circles, not thinking at all about the book in the study and whether it's still there. He turns on the pad, not wondering if he'll hear steps on the stairs.

But he knows the moment the phone rings that Jonathan is gone.

They don't mention his name at first, the police. They ask if there's been a break-in, if a servant's disappeared, if anything's missing.

“If this is about Mr. Lem, he hasn't done anything wrong,” says Everett. “Is he there? I'll come pick him up right away.”

They assure him that that isn't necessary, that they can return his book and money at his leisure and contact him again at the court date.

“I'm not coming for anything. That all belongs to him. I'm coming to take him home.” He's not sure how he would explain his words if they thought to question him about what “home” he was talking about – his own or wherever Jonathan once, but probably no longer, lives. But the word feels strangely good in his mouth, and they don't ask anyway.

He spends the trip to the station seething. Did Jonathan really not think there would be something suspicious about a man skulking through the Gardens in the dead of night? If not, he was an idiot. If so, he risked it just so he wouldn't even have to say goodbye. He deserves to have to look Everett in the eye and explain himself.

Even after his insistence on the phone, they present him with Jonathan's jacket, his money, and _The Pale Machines_ as soon as he walks into the station. “I told you, they're his,” he snaps. “Where is he?”

One of them, like an uncomfortable blue-suited Virgil, beckons him down the station's mildewed cement hall. They stop at what must be a sickbay, its antiseptic smell and stacked wads of gauze and IV tubing the only hint. It's empty but for a shape in the corner with dark hair and a rumpled white shirt. Everett turns to find the officer gone, so he approaches Jonathan himself. He knows immediately why they didn't want to be around for his reaction.

Jonathan is asleep, one wrist cuffed to the narrow metal cot. His shirt is torn open, and his old scars are barely visible under a mess of welts and bruises. There's a deep, black circle under one eye and a crust of blood on his lip. Everett looks down at his injured hand and sees that it's unwrapped and livid, two nailless fingers snapped out of place. Everett kneels to get a better look at his face – they must have put him under, because it's the only way he could look so blankly peaceful in this state.

Everett's anger at Jonathan has vanished. He wishes he could tell him that this is all over, and they're leaving. But he shouldn't be woken right now, that much is clear. Everett can't even imagine what internal injuries he might have under the bruises.

“You've gotta understand, he looked awfully suspicious,” says Everett's Virgil when he returns to the lobby. “And he was damn _sullen_ – wouldn't tell us anything. He could have made it easy.”

Everett doesn't answer. He takes a vindictive pleasure in ordering the officers to carry Jonathan out and call a medical car to take him to the best hospital in the district. He plucks the book and jacket from the front desk and takes them with him. “For safekeeping,” he snarls at the officer on duty. “Since you've stolen them.”

On his way out, they apologize profusely, but he gets the feeling that they're not sure what for.

He returns home only briefly, to pick up a new set of the clothes for Jonathan. The nurse who admits him when he arrives at the hospital, to her credit, doesn't ask why they've taken someone in from the common prison. She only runs through an exhausting litany of harm, through which Everett pieces together the night before.

Jonathan has been beaten badly and at length, by someone who knew exactly where to cause pain but not immediately fatal injury. There are galvanic marks on his skin, and evidence that his muscles contorted badly enough to turn two fractured ribs into broken ones. The nurse is delicate about it, but he's been raped – more times, Everett infers between the lines, than she wants to tell him.

And his hand – his hand is pure, sadistic torture that somehow feels worse to Everett than all the rest. They saw a vulnerability and ruthlessly exploited it, found a man who had been hurt and deliberately compounded his pain. His only consolation is that it's not as bad as it looks, the nurse tells him; only a pair of dislocations and a renewal of the bruises on his fingertips.

“Sir, if you don't mind – what happened? How did he set someone off on him like that?” she asks.

“He looked suspicious, is what they told me.”

“It had to have been more than that, didn't it?”

“Yes. They said he was sullen.”

“And that was enough?”

“I suppose so. I'll have to ask him, when he wakes up.”


	11. A Three-Point Plan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a frank discussion of the possibility of true consent under extreme inequality.

Jonathan wakes, for a second time, to sheets and silence. This time he must be dead, he tells himself. Or comatose, dreaming. If he wakes, it'll be to a cold floor and the smell of someone else's sweat.

He looks down at his body, clad in a white hospital gown. He runs his good hand down the front, feeling the soft rubber of bandages under its fabric. The fingers of his other hand have been splinted and wrapped, and when he reaches up to touch his face there's a small, stiff piece of plastic on his cheek. He feels it all as though the body belongs to someone else, his own mind drifting somewhere above the bed.

The door opens, bringing him back to himself as Astor walks into the room.

How much does he know about what's happened? He must have had a hand in his treatment, because no one else would have sent him to a society hospital.

“I'm sorry for leaving,” he says, as soon as he thinks Astor's close enough to hear. “Thank you, and I'm – sorry, and – thank you.” He feels tears gather and blames it on whatever they've given him to block his mind from the pain.

Astor sits in the chair across from him and sighs. “You are the absolute last person in the world who needs to feel sorry right now,” he says. “Have they given you enough painkillers?”

“I really am,” Jonathan presses on. Astor doesn't understand how incredibly wrong it feels to make someone like him go through saving an Industry City slum worker and nursing him back to health not once, but twice – and both times because of what any other society man or woman would dub Jonathan's own carelessness. Even if the part of him that can think straight is nearly certain that Astor doesn't blame or resent him for it, the belief has percolated through his mind for so many years that it's impossible to shake off. “I didn't mean to make you come after me.”

“Jonathan, if I hadn't come after you, you'd be in worse shape than you already are, and I'd never know. You might have – have hurt my feelings a little by leaving, but thinking that someone might do something like this to you and you'd let me just leave you there to take it is worse. I'm not going to let your proletarian martyr complex get in the way of helping someone I – someone I really _like_.”

His half-drugged mind finds the intensity of Astor's speech somehow moving and funny at the same time, and he tries to keep the evidence of both feelings off his face. “I'm s– ” he realizes Astor will probably only tell him to stop apologizing and stops himself first. “I'm glad I could see you again.”

Astor looks down, and Jonathan wonders if he's managed to hide his emotions nearly as well as he hopes. Then Astor reaches for a bag near his feet. “I brought your book.”

“I guess I'll have time to finish it here,” Jonathan says. “Did they... say how long?”

“Not more than a few days at the hospital, actually, if things go right. I can take you back home, after. If that's what you want, I mean.”

Jonathan manages a nod, but his mind has gone back and gotten stuck, weighing the implications of _someone I really like_. “Mr. Shao-Astor, I – ”

“Oh god, is that how you've been thinking of me? It makes me sound like your schoolmaster or something, and I'm not possibly that much older. I'm Everett.”

Jonathan actually laughs this time, controlled by some strange part of his mind that the painkillers have brought to the forefront. It quickly cedes power to the part that's near tears again. “I just... I don't know what you want, or if I can do it,” he says. “If I were somebody different, somebody like you, we could have fun together. But right now... Everett... you're the only thing in my life that's not _horror_. I can't be with somebody I owe like this.”

“I know,” says Astor – says Everett. “I don't think I could do it either, if you stayed with me. I can't have an honest affair with somebody who'll be destitute if it ends. But there are three points I want to make. One: you're perfectly capable of taking care of yourself if you can find anyone to treat you fairly. Two: I have, to be totally blunt, too much money to feel like you owe me anything. Three: There are openings at the Petrarch assembly plant on the east side of Industry City, with which I have no production contracts or other financial interests. You may at some point have to meet my ex-husband, who is a decent man with an absolute inability to manage his own supply chain. I can't say it's the kind of pay I'd want. But I can promise, it's a lot better than the looms, and...”

“That's... too many points,” Jonathan says, trying not to slur his words. “You'll have to say it over when I can think again.”

Everett's face, which has taken on a nearly triumphant air, sobers. “Sorry. I came up with it last night, and I was looking forward so much to telling you. But really – I don't want to lose you. That's all I mean.”

The maudlin part of Jonathan's mind has taken over again under the drugs – or at least that's what he tells himself. It makes him reach out with his good hand across the bed and feel, when Everett takes it in his own, a distant sense that is suspiciously like affection. It's the most dangerous emotion, he knows, an intoxicant that turns to poison all too easily. But he's been tired and alone for so long, and having an ally – not an owner, or a detached benefactor – is a rare and precious possibility. “Me too,” he says. By the time he realizes that the words don't quite make sense, he's drifting away again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for reading! We're almost at the end, I swear. I'm a big fan of the (slightly-too-long-to-be-a-)novelette.


	12. Narrative Justification

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which endings are, if not unambiguously happy, at least optimistic by the absurdly grim standards of the future.

Everett takes Jonathan from the hospital as soon as he can manage. His body has taken more shock than anyone's should have to, but there's not much they can do for his ribs and splinted hand that Everett can't manage at home. Jonathan spends most of his time sleeping at first anyway, and in his waking hours he seems content to gaze at the ceiling, as though something not particularly fascinating but sufficiently diverting can be found in its texture. After a day or two he asks for a dictionary and reads silently. He's slower than before, Everett thinks, but he chalks it up to the painkillers – there's nothing permanent about Jonathan's conditions, given time.

Coming up the stairs out of an investors call, sitting by Jonathan's side as usual, Everett sighs. He always feels a pang of guilt when he looks at the bed, because while he wants to believe that Jonathan is simply the unluckiest man alive, he's only one fragment of the grist that makes its way through the looms and the streets and the prisons. He just happens to be the one that Everett can't stop looking at, who he wishes could be sitting in the study swapping stories with him instead of healing from god knows how many wounds.

“I must look awful,” Jonathan says abruptly, interrupting his thoughts – Everett hadn't realized he was awake. “Like those tapes they show of factory accidents during training.”

Everett reaches for the painkillers on the side table, but Jonathan shakes his head. “The old ones haven't worn off yet. I keep looking at my hand and thinking it's got to belong to somebody else, somebody who hurts a lot worse.” He gives as much of a laugh as anyone with barely knitted ribs could probably manage. “I don't know what I am anymore anyway, outside the factories.”

“How much does the answer matter?” asks Everett. It's not anything he's ever wondered about himself, although sometimes he wishes he felt the inclination; being born into a name and purpose is as lulling as it is daunting.

“I'd feel better if I had one, and not just about the work. Everything keeps changing on me now – I at least wish I had some kind of stable place to see it from.”

“What do you mean?”

Jonathan props himself against the headboard and looks at Everett – he does it with almost no hesitation now; he's even used Everett's first name once or twice. “Sorry, but... you have to get that nobody would ever have showed me how to deal with this, you know?” He gestures loosely at the apartment. “Or if they did they did it wrong, like all the comics and the plays about this kind of thing. You're supposed to be some smart society girl, and I'm supposed to show you the real world, and I'm not supposed to be so useless...”

“Well, I like to think I'm smart, and you're not useless – ”

Jonathan grabs Everett's wrist and drags him in, as if he's about to kiss him. Everett fights the reflex to return it, makes himself back away. “I don't want you trying to be _useful_ either, not like this,” he says. “And even besides that, you're hardly even put together again. And besides that, I don't want to drag up... everything you've gone through. You said it yourself before you left, and that was before...”

“No, I mean this isn't... obligation.” Jonathan shakes his head. He sits up, flinching – though not in pain, Everett thinks, so much as the knowledge that pain should be happening. “Did they tell you about everything, in the hospital?”

“I... yes, a little. Jonathan, I'm so– ”

“It's fine,” he says slowly. “I mean, it's not fine, but it means I don't have to. But they wouldn't have said that... look, when everything happened after Morgan and things got bad, I just tried to forget she existed, forget all the moments I was happy with her so I wouldn't know they were over. You, though... I didn't _want_ to forget you. I didn't think I'd see you any more than her, but I wanted to at least remember that things could be better. And I – damn it, I keep wondering if it was the right thing to do.”

He puts a hand – not the one splinted up so methodically it looks almost robotic, but the one that's warm and callused – up to Everett's face, and Everett lets him. “Sure you were right,” he says. “Even if you leave for good, I'm not the only decent person you'll ever meet.” Thinking back to every interaction he's seen involving Jonathan, he narrowly stops himself from adding _hopefully_ to the end of the sentence. “And you can leave, soon. If you want.”

Jonathan runs his hand slowly back to Everett's ear, his hair. “I don't know,” he says. “I'm not saying you're the only one for me, or that you're _a_ one for me, or anything like that. But I don't think it'll hurt me to find out for sure. Unless you don't want – ”

Everett looks over at him. “Of course I do,” he says. “Just heal first, for god's sake.”

He can't think of anything to say after that, but he doesn't have to. Jonathan leans in to him this time, and it can't hurt, Everett thinks – it can't hurt to kiss him just once, to slide fingers through the delicate wire of his hair and carefully touch the parts of him that aren't broken. To be gripped with a strength and delicacy that he's forgotten Jonathan must have, after a lifetime of working with his hands. To catch the ivory of Jonathan's teeth with the tip of his tongue. To imagine a day soon when they can meet as, if not equals, two people together from want instead of need. As they finally break away from each other, he wonders what Jonathan has been thinking. But at times like this, every man deserves the privacy of his own mind.

Jonathan takes more pills, and soon he's in the still-eyed, dreamless sleep of the justifiably sedated. Everett picks up _The Pale Machines_ and flips it open to Jonathan's bookmark. He'll get to the part that Everett always hated as a child soon: the moment when the travelers briefly return home to find its air unbreathable and its soil poisonous, changed to suit the mechanical colonists who drove them out. Still, there would be no book without the colonists, no pyramid forests and underwater cities. There's no narrative or purpose to the real world, Everett knows, no carefully plotted line from tragedy to joy. But if he closes his eyes, he can still tell a story that makes sense of it all. And in a story, he can pick any ending he wants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everybody who read this - I'm stuck in my own head so much writing that it's nice to have feedback. This has turned out slightly better than I thought it might.


End file.
